November 16, 2022

Experts do a lot of guessing; and they tend to guess wrong. That's because demands keep getting more complex, while the inability to meet the demands keeps increasing. Experts tend to do more telling than looking, because being an expert is quite time consuming.

SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) is being related to sleep posture, which appears true enough; but the advice is not credible. The advice is to have babies sleep flat on their backs.

Old age provides a lot of information about physiology and nutrition due to increased demands as physiology deteriorates. With age, I have noticed more and more that if I sleep exactly flat on my back, I can lose the ability to automatically breath, which eventually wakes me up. There seems to be something about automatic inhalation that can stop working when exactly flat on one's back.

There is some physics logic to the problem of inhaling when flat on one's back. The force of breathing has to push the entire chest area upward against gravity and normal structure which is designed for holding a particular shape. Breathing is much easier when lying on one side, because then gravity and a particular shape are not acting against breathing. Also noticeable is that lying on the right side puts less force on the heart than lying on the left side.

If exact flatness on one's back is the problem, then babies should be sleeping on a slight angle, which is not what experts are saying. They don't explain any evidence, which means they are just guessing. Experts are not good at guessing, because they spend too much of their time doing other things than studying the infinite complexities that make up human problems.